United Front: Projecting Solidarity through Deliberation in Vietnam's Single Party Legislature.

• Author: Nguyen, Hai Hong

United Front: Projecting Solidarity through Deliberation in Vietnam's Single Party Legislature. By Paul Schuler. Redwood City, California: Stanford University Press, 2021. Hardcover: 247pp.

Although the past two decades have seen a growing body of literature on the role of parliaments in authoritarian regimes, Vietnam's National Assembly (NA), a key political institution responsible for law-making in the party-state, remained excluded as a case study. Paul Schuler's United Front: Projecting Solidarity through Deliberation in Vietnam's Single Party Legislature, the first monograph in the English language on the NA, therefore deserves to be widely acknowledged as it lays the foundation for future studies on this increasingly important Vietnamese institution.

In addition to the Introduction and Conclusion, the book consists of seven main chapters. Chapter One revisits the extant literature on authoritarian legislatures and flesh out its central theoretical argument: the purpose of legislatures in single-party regimes is first and foremost to signal authoritarian dominance and legitimacy. Chapters Two to Seven test this theoretical argument by using the NA as a case study. The book concludes by summarizing the findings and offering perspectives on the politically transformative role of the NA and authoritarian legislatures more generally. Possessing a deep knowledge of Vietnamese politics, and fluent in Vietnamese, Schuler was able to access Vietnamese archives and conduct interviews directly with locals, especially NA officials, during the research for this book, allowing him to draw strong and insightful conclusions.

According to Schuler, the Vietnamese NA has progressively evolved in terms of internal organization, the selection and election of its leaders, as well as the technical reforms to improve its legislative functions since the adoption of Doi Moi (Renovation) in 1986. More interestingly, scholars undertaking comparative studies of Vietnamese and Chinese politics would realize, through Schuler's discussion of recent developments in the NA's performance, that the way in which it operates is, in certain respects, more democratic than its Chinese counterpart. For instance, holding votes of no-confidence against high-level officeholders and televised question and answer sessions are elements of the Vietnamese NA that are not present in China's National People's Congress. However, as Schuler points out in Chapter Six, these elements are...